Shopify Adds Sales Channels To Help You Sell From More Places

A lot of businesses are about to have a lot more ways to sell their products with Shopify. The company announced that it is giving developers tools to build new sales channels to put Shopify into more and more apps. Right off the bat, eBates, Houzz, Wanelo are getting them, and more will be on the way.

The idea is that people are shopping in all kinds of apps, and Shopify wants to give sellers a chance to get at potential customers in more places.

"Managing several channels should be every bit as simple as managing one," says Shopify's Satish Kanwar. "With Shopify, you get a single place to run your business, one, unified platform for managing all your channels, products, orders, customers, and analytics."

"To make selling through multiple channels even easier, we’ve made some improvements to Shopify," he adds. "These improvements, which will be rolling out over the coming weeks, refine the channels experience and make it easier to explore new ways to grow your business."

You can find Sales Channels from the left navigation in Shopify.

Expect to see many more sales channels emerge in the future. Developers can find the Sales Channel SDK and everything they need to get started here.

Last week, Shopify launched a new WordPress plugin and some new themes. This will also be a tremendous help for a lot of businesses, making it easier to sell on WordPress sites.

Both the themes and plugin are free. You can use them to add products to any of your pages or blogposts without leaving the content management platform.

"As usual, you’ll still manage all of your pages and posts in WordPress, but you’ll have Shopify to manage everything else: payments, secure checkout, shipping and fulfillment, inventory, and taxes—all the hard things about selling online," says Shopify's Daniel Patricio.

The themes are called Hype by Themezilla, Simple by Themify, and Pulse by Ultralinx. You can see them below in that order.

"Installing the plugin adds the ability to easily drop products with buy buttons into any sidebar, page or blog post," says Patricio. "Plus, you’ll get a slick pop-out shopping cart for your site, so customers can purchase multiple products at once."

While the plugin is free to Shopify users, it does cost $9 a month for a "lite" Shopify plan. The plan will also get you Facebook Shop, Shopify POS for iOS or Android, access to the Shopify app store, and 24/7 support.

Last month, Shopify posted its 2015 year in Review. In this, it revealed that it currently has over 243,000 businesses in over 150 countries. They added over 98,000 merchants last year alone. This was of course when they added buy buttons for Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter as well as a mobile SDK enabling the sales of products in mobile apps and Apple Pay. They also partnered with Amazon to bring Amazon services to merchants, and with Uber on local shipping.